Back to the series of posts I am writing on WordPress plug-ins that you may want to consider checking out, whether you are writing posts for friends and family to stay in touch, or reviewing local bars. This time I wanted to let you know about a plug-in that checks the details of any person or system that leaves a comment, trackback or ping to one of your posts, and then displays the relevant info next to it. It is called, somewhat non-cryptically, Comment Info Detector, and you can see it in action if you click on any of the posts here that already have a comment published. A flag is used to indicate which country the person came from, and two icons, representing their operating system and the browser used are also displayed. The default settings should be just fine, but you can always tweak the code used to personalise the way the information is displayed. Finally, one option I am happy to see is the uninstall tick box. When selected, all relevant entries are removed from the WordPress MySQL table, meaning no bloat is left behind, should you decide to not use the plug-in anymore.
Sep 22 2010
Clean Options To Speed Up
This plug-in (Clean Options) is designed to make your website run faster. This means pages will load more quickly, and less visitors will leave (most people simply close the tab if a site takes more than a few seconds to load). Search engines also penalise sites that take a very long time to load, so your search engine rankings could improve. Whether you run AnnaMerriman.com, KZBlog.net or JavierEppens.com, a faster loading site means more visitors and those same visitors will be more likely to return.
So how does the Clean Options plug-in achieve this aim? It checks your WordPress options in the SQL tables, and alerts you to any that are orphaned. If you have uninstalled a plugin that did not have a clean up procedure built in properly, or just deleted the actual PHP files from your server, then you will have excess options that take up space, and cause your server to slow slightly. If you have only ever used the same plug-ins, or already manually trawl through your site’s data via PHPMyAdmin, then this plugin may not find much to prune, however it never harms to have a quick check, and there are quite a few built in checks to ensure you don’t delete anything that is still needed.
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Sep 22 2010
Any WP System Health Users Reading This?
Yes, another WordPress plug-in based post, but not a review this time. As you may have guessed from the post’s title, I was wondering if anyone had used the WP System Health plugin on their blog? I haven’t yet tried it out, but hoped someone might be able to say if it was worth finding some spare time to have a play with it? Am I likely to be depressed by some of the stats that will arise from using a shared hosting server, and are the configurable values important enough to ensure you’re awake and sober before investigating and testing them? I’m not worried about it not properly covering multi-site installs, as I’ve not yet delved into that side of WordPress – another project for those mystical days where I find I have a few hours spare to educate myself a little more!
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Sep 22 2010
Broken Link Checker
If you only ever write about your thoughts, and what is happening in your life, the following plugin may not be of much use to you. However, a lot of bloggers write articles that involve linking to other sites. Over time, those sites may shut down, or change their structure. Most web admins will not have the time or knowledge to automatically redirect people using an old address to the new location of a page.
This is where the Broken Link Checker can help you out. It will trawl through all your posts, and any time it finds a link that no longer works, it will alert you. You can then either update the link, remove it or simply leave it struck out, which is the default formatting applied to bad links that it finds. Say you are talking about the latest great deal on a console you have found, and then six months later the online shop changes the categories around, you will know that you need to either link to an alternative supplier, or try and re-find the supplement on the original site.
New links are checked very quickly, and you can tell the plugin how often old, previously checked links should be re-checked. You can decide whether to check the results from within WordPress’s admin area, or if you prefer you can be e-mailed each time a link is found to be broken. Obviously checking links will use your server’s processing time, and if you use a shared host, with a lot of links on your site, you may need to use the plug-in’s settings to control how much processing time is used.
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Sep 22 2010
Auto Thickbox
This is another install it and forget about it plugin. The easiest way to descrive what Auto Thickbox does is to ask you to click on an image within a post. So click the thumbnail below, and you’ll see the plug-in in action…
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers - The Movie - Snapshot
With a normal WordPress install, when you click on an image, one of two things will happen. Either the browser will display just the picture, or if the blogger has elected to use image posts, the browser will display the image in what looks like a new post, just for the picture. Now, whether you are displaying a photo, or a much delayed film of an outstanding comic series, the visitor will see the picture in an overlay, with the rest of the site greyed out in the background. If you have multiple pictures within one post, the plug-in will turn the experience into a basic gallery, and the visitor can navigate through the images without having to return to the original post each time.
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Sep 22 2010
Putting Asides Inside Your Site
On this blog posts are displayed in two different ways. The normal method is the post’s title is displayed, with the date, categories and then the main post content itself. However, whenever I send a tweet, using up all that space for something that will be less than 140 characters just seems silly. This is where the AsideShop plug-in comes into play.
You decide which categories a post must belong in, and the plugin will then decide whether to process the post as normal, or just present the actual text of the post, with a small link to the comments section after it. This can save around 60-80% of the space used normally, and hopefully helps to make tweets a little more natural, and doesn’t stop the flow as much. You could of course reverse what I do, depending on the topic of your blog, and have all categories except for one or two be set as asides. If you blog about fashion, the plugin could set up so it misses clothing for children posts, but all others are just presented in a minimalist fashion.
You can also set whether asides should be displayed in a compact form all over your site, or only on certain pages (a bit like the Google AdSense plugin, you may want it to only appear on the homepage, or archives, or search results etc.
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Sep 22 2010
All in One SEO Pack
Next on the conveniently alphabetical list of plug-ins used on this site is All in One SEO Pack. I’ve not mentioned Akismet, as it comes with WordPress automatically, kills spam for you, and if you have a blog without it enabled (or something similar), these posts aren’t likely to help you much.
So, getting back to the All in One SEO pack, the basic premise is that you install and activate it, and after a couple of minutes of tweaking your site will appeal so search engines a lot more. As is true with the AdSense plugin I mentioned earlier, you could manually make almost all of these changes within the theme you use, and by editing fields for each page and post you write. However, not only would you need a fair amount of SEO knowledge, you would also find it adds on to the time you need to maintain your site every day. If you sell books on your site, you want to concentrate on the customer information and products, not the back-end work. To fine tune the settings, you will need to a little research into what settings make the most difference, and to be honest, I’ve not done very much at all apart from accepting the defaults.
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Sep 22 2010
Tracking Thieves
I came across a piece online titled “My Relentless Pursuit Of The Guy Who Robbed Me”, and thought you might like to read it as well. When reading this article, just click on the continue reading after the first five paragraphs.
It reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when Mum was buying something on e-bay for her and John’s wedding. One set did not turn up, despite having been paid for, and the seller seeming legitimate. As time was counting down, Mum was understandably starting to stress out about it.
Starting with a name and e-bay account, I decided to see what I could discover about the person, who’s excuses were starting to sound pretty phoney, and I hoped to at least name and shame the person if they didn’t sort things out ASAP. In the end, I found their home phone number, the names of their family members, the address, parish council they served on, their workplace and boss’s direct number, and a couple of other little things.
Eventually, armed with enough information to ensure we had the right person, and multiple avenues of approach re. turning up the communication of our displeasure a few notches, a friendly local policeman had words with the e-bay seller, and within a day or two, all the goods turned up! Pure coincidence, I’m sure. I don’t know if I could have started randomly calling parish councillors anyway, but her boss wouldn’t have phased me 🙂
My thanks to Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) for the heads up on this story.
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Sep 21 2010
All in One Adsense and YPN
It has been more almost two years since I wrote a series of posts on the plug-ins used for this WordPress blog. Since then I’ve cut down on some of the code that did nothing on the front end for visitors, but did slow down the server somewhat, especially when occasional spikes of high traffic occurred.
So, I’ll go through them alphabetically, mainly because that way it is easier for me to keep a track about which ones I’ve already mentioned. I’ll try and stick to one post per plug-in, but for the simple/popular ones, I’ll probably combine posts.
First on the list? All in One Adsense and YPN. The principle behind the code is to provide a one stop shop for blog owners, whether they write about their life in Kazakhstan, to place PPC adverts (Yahoo and/or Google’s AdSense) on the page. You just type in advert network’s ID, select whether you want text, image or both type of adverts, and the dimensions that are allowed. Once you have selected the colours to be used (text, background, URLs etc.), number of ads per post and/or page and the justification (top, bottom, left, right, centre etc.) you are all done. If you want to wrap the advert within some code (be careful with Google on that one), or hide the adverts from certain types of pages, it just takes a click or two. One minor thing you need to notice is that the plug-in’s config page is titled just “AdSense”, which normally throws me for a few seconds if I haven’t changed any settings in a while.
You can of course simply add the exact code you want into template files manually, but should you change themes, or just update it to a more recent version, you’ll always need to make sure you’ve kept a copy of the code and where it was inserted, then hope the new/new version of your theme will work as well without too much tweaking. Using a plug-in means you can skip all of those headaches and just know it will work.
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Aug 26 2010
@PockeTwit Just out of interes…
@PockeTwit Just out of interest, have u checked how TwitterTools(a WordPress plugin)has handled changeover to OAuth?( http://bit.ly/cSz6Z3 )
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